Painter Matthew Warren Lee's 'Utopia?' at RedLine Milwaukee

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The Ancient Cluster

The Ancient Cluster, Oil on Panel, 24 x 36 in., 2014, by Matthew Warren Lee

Matthew Warren Lee’s exhibition, “To Whom Do We Owe Utopia?” at RedLine Milwaukee, brings together nature, science fiction, meticulous painting, plus ruminations on the abilities and failures of humankind.

Idealism and decay are often melded together, reflecting on an innate conflict. This gives a powerful symbolic quality to Lee’s paintings. He is inspired by various traditions in landscape and you’ll notice a sense of drama that draws back to the Romantic period of the 19th century, or a feeling of epic wilderness that harkens to American painters of that time. What Lee does is bring them into a futuristic world by envisioning dense settlements of crisp, minimalist architecture or monumental telescopes fixated on the stars from a desolate outpost.

These paintings are not all fiction, however. Lee’s time spent in the Antarctic inspired compositions like South Pole Telescope 2, where the dark sky is overtaken by a heavens filled with green and red lights crossing over the black scrim of stars. On the ground, situated by a very low horizon, is the scientific station perched over the icy land. The telescope is the reason for being there, as the powerful machine peers through the sky and space.

The wonderment of these sorts of achievements is part of Lee’s work, but also the disappointment of failing and catastrophe in light of our inabilities to prevent or correct mistakes. The Empire of Debris shows a forest fire devouring a verdant landscape. The conflagration of the forest is much like we have seen recently in California, but the rolling imagery was in fact inspired by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Humankind has an extraordinary ability to understand the natural world, but our power to command it and bend nature for our consumptive tastes has significant consequences.

Is utopia in the form of a perfect city or crystalline mountain, as we see in these paintings? Perhaps it was already here and we missed it while coating our world with technological glaze. This dichotomy and questions linger under the larger question of “To Whom Do We Owe Utopia?”

Through March 24 at RedLine Milwaukee, 1422 N. Fourth St.